The United Kingdom (UK) dominated the Bloomberg Businessweek Best International Business Schools Rankings 2016 capturing the first, third and fourth ranks on an year that saw it voting for exiting the European Union (EU).

The British march was led by London Business School (LBS) that moved up one slot to occupy the first rank pushing out Ivey Business School of Western University, Canada to the 10th spot.

INSEAD, third ranked in the previous year, moved to the second spot while the third rank went to Oxford Said that climbed 3 spots from its 6th rank. Yet another British b-school, Cambridge Judge, moved up 4 spots to occupy the 4th rank. Imperial College, London was another to move up 5 spots to 15th rank from its previous year’s 20th rank.

IESE moved 2 spots from 7 to capture the 5th rank. However, its fellow Spanish school IE dropped 2 spots to the 6th rank. Switzerland’s IMD too saw a 2 spot drop to 7th rank. SDA Bocconi, however, climbed 4 spots from being ranked 12th in the previous year to the 8th spot this year.

The best progress was achieved by Melbourne Business School that shot up 14 spots to rank 9th from its previous year’s ranking of 23.

Survey Database

Bloomberg Businessweek states that the rankings were based on data compiled from more than 1,000 recruiters, 15,000 alumni, and 9,000 recent graduates. Over the years since its ranking of full-time MBA programs started in 1988, the methodology has shifted to focus on how well the programs prepare their graduates for job success.

The Employer Survey, which measures recruiter opinions on how well MBA programs equip their graduates with relevant skills, and Student Survey with a weightage of 35% records feedback from students on how thoroughly they have been prepared for the workforce. The alumni survey rank constitute 30%, student survey rank 15%, salary rank and job placement rank 10% each.

For Employer Survey, schools to identify people recently involved in recruiting their MBAs. As many as 11,877 recruiters were invited to take the survey and 1,055 recruiters at more than 500 companies completed it. They were asked to identify up to 10 schools at which they had significant recruiting experience in the past five years. Then, they were to assess how well these schools’ graduates performed on specific qualities important to them when they recruit MBAs.

To ensure that employers that hired only a few MBAs did not have outsize weight in the analysis, each company was given an index score representing the total number of MBAs it hired in 2014 and 2015 (estimated using a combination of data provided by schools, recruiters, and students). The recruiters’ raw scores were then weighed by their index scores for employer size. Ratings from employers that hired many MBAs had a greater impact than ratings from those that hired just a few.

Because the best MBA programs are regarded well by a wide array of recruiters, the employer score was based equally on two components: average rating by employers (a measure of the school’s quality in the eyes of recruiters) and the sum of ratings the school received (a measure of its reach).

For alumni survey, responses were sought from all graduates of the classes of 2008, 2009, and 2010. Slightly more than 15,000 survey responses were received from alumni. To be included in the rankings, each school was required to have at least 30 students from its 2008-10 classes respond; larger programs were required to reach a threshold ranging from 10 % to 25%. (Image Source:Flag_of_the_United_Kingdom.svg)